Cinematic Counter-Archives of Palestine: Memory, Erasure, and Resistance
This program centers on the role of film as a counter-archive under conditions of genocide and Israeli apartheid, examining the systematic erasure of Palestinian culture in its many forms. Featuring A Night We Held Between (2024, Noor Abed), letter to a friend (2019, Emily Jacir), Electrical Gaza (2015, Rosalind Nashashibi), and There Was Nothing Here Before (2024, Yvann Yagchi), the screenings at eikones this fall will be followed by discussions with the filmmakers, foregrounding cinema as a space of memory, resistance, and reimagining.

Organized by: David Bucheli (eikones), Aïcha Revellat (eikones), Ute Holl (Media Studies), Falestin Naïli (Near and Middle Eastern Studies), Lorena Rizzo (African Studies), and Peter Burleigh (English Seminar).

With the generous support of eikones – Center for the Theory and History of the Image, Media Studies, swisspeace, African Studies, and Near and Middle Eastern Studies. 

22 October: letter to a friend (2019, 43min). Guest: Emily Jacir, Chair: Aïcha Revellat
13 November: Electrical Gaza (2015, 18min). Guest: Rosalind Nashashibi, Chair: Falestin Naïli
20 November: A Night We Held Between (2024, 30min). Guest: Noor Abed, Chair: Chus Martínez
8 December: Avant, il n’y avait rien / There Was Nothing Here Before (2024, 71min). Guest: Yvann Yagchi, Chair: Ute Holl

Yvann Yagchi is a Swiss-Palestinian director, screenwriter, producer and cinematographer based in Geneva, whose deeply personal films combine autobiographical elements with subjects of great social and political urgency. He holds a Master in Journalism from Université Libre de Bruxelles and in documentary filmmaking from the the National Film and Television School in England. After working as a journalist in Belgium and Switzerland, he became a cameraman for the BBC and then a documentary director. His first feature-length documentary Acta Non Verba premiered at the 70th Locarno Film Festival in 2017. There Was Nothing Here Before, his second feature film, premiered at the 53rd International Film Festval Rotterdam in 2024 and was nominated for the Swiss Film Award in the category «Best Documentary Film».

There Was Nothing Here Before follows the Swiss-Palestinian filmmaker Yvann Yagchi as he attempts, unsuccessfully, to reunite with a childhood friend now living in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. Drawing on his private family archive, Yagchi recalls their formative years together in Switzerland, before the friendship unravels upon his arrival at the heavily fortified settlement. Yagchi turns instead to tracing his ancestral history, uncovering the dispossessed books of his great-grandfather in the National Library of Israel. Through delicately animated sequences, fragments of a rich cultural and intellectual heritage—suppressed by Israeli archival practices—are momentarily brought back to life.

Ute Holl is a filmmaker, media scholar, writer and professor for media aesthetics at Basel University. Her research interests cover the history of cinema and perception, knowledge politics and archival strategies, the media history of acoustics and electroacoustics, as well as experimental, ethnographic and documentary film. Among her many research activities, she lead a SNF funded project on Trauma- and Memoryscapes in the Postrevolutionary Iranian Cinema from 2015 to 2018 and recenentley completed a SNF funded project titled The (In)Audible Past on colonial sound archives in Namibia, South Africa and Switzerland.